Pages

Sunday, 1 November 2015

The River Lynher in Cornwall Where I Now Live!

At last, after years of yearning to live in the country, I have moved to south east Cornwall from east London. We moved early September but I've been travelling nonstop since then and have only now started to settle in and explore the landscape. Yesterday we walked on Bodmin Moor, very close to us, and this morning we crossed the fifteenth century Stara Bridge, about two miles from our house, along the River Lynher, following the muddy path through Stara Woods. The Lynher is a fast flowing steep river with rapids, dizzying to look into, so it was with some terror that I crossed a suspension bridge over it that swayed and bounced as I clung to the rope sides. The suspension bridge reminds me of a trek I did in the Annapurnas, over more terrifying bridges, but at least those were wider! The third photo below was taken by my husband halfway across, no way would I ever let go of the ropes to do that!

The other two photos were also taken by him, after a long trek through the woods to upper cascades on a tributary of the Lynher. Along the riverside there are sandy banks where kingfishers might be spotted, so we'll be back often in case we get lucky. The Lynher is also a hundred yards from our house, and quite wide at that point, we can hear it from our garden but we are up a hill so out of the flood zone. Our front garden is wild, rather like a miniature Bodmin Moor, with hummocks and impossible-to-mow grass, and is bordered by a Cornish wall. The back garden is where my den is, from it I can observe goldfinches, chaffinches, and wrens peep in through my windows. The patio doors look out onto the low back wall and a back field where three very fat pet pigs have their snouts buried in clover.

About Me

Pascale’s seventh collection Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in September 2017, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2018 and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. It is set in a psychiatric ward and the Amazon rainforest, an asylum for animals on the brink of extinction, and draws on her travels in the Peruvian Amazon. Pascale’s sixth collection, Fauverie (Seren), was her fourth to be shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and five poems from it won the Manchester Poetry Prize. Her books have been translated into Spanish, (in Mexico), Chinese, French and Serbian. Pascale has had three collections chosen as Books of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, Independent and Observer. In 2015 she received a Cholmondeley Award and in 2017 an RSL Literature Matters Award.